


Four Thousand Winters

by greenbirds



Series: Friends'verse shorts [3]
Category: NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-07
Updated: 2011-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a long time, but Hetty Lange has come home for Christmas.  Prequel to "Friends" and "Both Feel."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Thousand Winters

Christmas Eve, and it's snowing gently, the fat, wet flakes reflecting the light of streetlamps and the headlamps of passing cars (not the cold dry wind-driven snow of icy Decembers in Moscow, but the snow Hetty remembers from childhood Christmas visits to her mama's people in Oxfordshire; she can almost feel the ribbons in her braids tickling her cheeks, the tightness of brand-new patent leather shoes, the scratchy lace at cuffs and collar). The sky is gray, but if it cleared, it would be moonless and bright with stars.

The suit she wears (under her old faithful black overcoat) is new from Selfridge's, a heavy, dark-gray worsted wool over a blouse of garnet silk. Her shoes are new as well, and soft leather (she should have worn boots, but this snow was unexpected). The new clothes feel strange against her skin (crow's skin, crossed staves in a field), as strange as this world she's returned to, a world away from Moscow and Leningrad (which will be St. Petersburg again before long, or so they tell her), a universe apart from the dry windswept reaches of Afghanistan. Cambridge, England, but it might as well be Mars.

Her plane had landed at Heathrow yesterday, Paris direct to London, normal as anything, full of business travelers and men and women laden down with Christmas parcels and holding the hands of small children.

“I'm going home,” Hetty had told her seatmate when the young man from Yorkshire asked, but it had been a lie (a polite lie, a necessary one, but a lie nonetheless; all Cretans are).

(Her home, like Atlantis, like Nineveh before it, doesn't exist anymore, lost to the tides of change and democracy and the modern world, and she might suffer the fate of Lot's wife if she spends too long looking back. So Hetty doesn't look. She thinks of Los Angeles, where she'll be in a few weeks. She thinks of England, where she is now. She wonders – she always wonders, and almost never knows – where Jack (her Vanyeshka, her Jacky-boy) is spending Christmas this year).

She has a standing invitation from Clive, to come to that charming little house by the sea in Cornwall and sleep in the pretty room under the west gable with the lace curtains and the _matryoshka_ dolls that Hetty brought him as a gift years ago (painstakingly painted with scenes from “The Snow Queen”) on the bedside table and the little leather-bound copy of _Anna Kareinina_ in Russian (Clive had saved it, had brought it from Berlin, after) tucked in among all the other books in the bookcase. Perhaps she'll go after the New Year's.

For now Hetty's in Cambridge.

She could be – should be – at King's College with her Aunt Claire, now a stately old woman with steel-gray hair, a widow for the last ten years (and Hetty misses Uncle Charlie and his big laugh even now), with rank upon rank of first and second cousins; she should be sitting on a hard pew, looking at the choristers in their red cassocks and high collars, smiling at friends of the family who she barely remembers.

She should be there, but they wouldn't understand where she's been, where she's going, don't know the roads she's walked going away from here and coming back. (They'd knock on the back of the wardrobe and find it a panel of solid wood.)

So instead Hetty is in this tiny church tucked away down a side street, stone walls darkened with time and obscure enough the tourists still haven't found it. Not far down the road at Catz, at Queen's, they're packed cheek-by-jowl in the chapels, with three rows standing on tiptoe in the back, straining to see.

Here, Hetty slides into an empty pew in the dimness. The hymnals and the Books of Common Prayer are worn but obviously well-cared-for; the wood of the pew in front of her worn smooth by the brush of generations of hands. The sanctuary is fragrant with evergreen boughs, with the familiar scent of wax.

Once upon a time when the world was a different place, they had come here in ones and twos, every year their feet had been on Western soil at Christmas. One year she'd met Clive here. One year, Hetty brought Jack. Jethro and Jenny and Dr. Mallard – Ducky – had come here to give thanks, after the incident with the sailboat that Hetty wasn't supposed to know about.

(God hates a spy, or so the saying went. But Hetty's mama said no harm ever came of praying.)

The old rector had been one of the Friends, before he'd found his calling, but that was a long time ago. The new rector looks to her eyes like little more than a boy in his vestments, and it seems silly to come here now, at this far remove; Hetty Lange is the last to come back from that other world. She'd say come home, but it's hard to say where home is in this brave new world.

It's Christmas Eve, and Henrietta Lange, wearing a new suit, has come to a little church in Cambridge.

The service has already begun and the church is in darkness when he slides into the pew beside her, a soft stirring of air at her elbow and the gentle creak of the wood underneath her seat. He smells of damp tweed and woodsmoke and something indefinable but familiar. He sighs softly, contentedly. He is English. The sound is somehow comforting.

(When she was a little girl, sitting in the dark church between her mama and her papa – her papa scoffed, but he always came on Christmas eve – Hetty liked to think of the shepherds watching their sheep on that cold, clear winter night, of the angel come to tell them. She liked to think of the wise men who made their long journey, guided only by faith and a strange bright star.)

She can't see who it is that has joined her until they light the candles, tiny points of warmth and light blooming in the chilly, pine-scented darkness, but when the light touches his face, he's smiling down at her (the kind of smile, her papa would have said, that comes straight from the heart).

“Ducky,” she murmurs, an answering smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

“Welcome home, Henrietta.”

Around them, candle flame after candle flame brightens the darkness.

“It's been a long night,” she says.

She feels Ducky's fingers (warm and dry and callused) close gently around her hand. “That's all right,” he says, and his voice is soft and kind. “Morning's coming.”

“Morning always does,” she agrees, remembering the sun rising over the snow in Moscow in a haze of gentle pinks and purples (she and Jack had been sure, that night, that they'd never see the sun again. They'd been wrong)

Around them, the congregation breathes softly, and then bursts into song.

 _Joy to the world,_ they all sing. _The lord is come_. Hetty joins her voice to theirs, feels the music resonate in her chest.

There are bells ringing, here and all through the city. As it had been in years past; as it will be in years to come, and she is here with an old friend.

(Fear not, the angel said. For I bring you good tidings of great joy.)

Tomorrow morning the sun will rise on new-fallen snow, and it will be Christmas.


End file.
